By J. Dana Sluster, Passport @ ForeignPolicy.com, August 15, 2013

[....] On Thursday, the National Security Archive reported that it had gotten its hands on a newly declassified CIA history of the development of the U-2 spy plane. The report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, contains the CIA's secret record of how Area 51 came to be. [....]

[....] The site became operational three months later, in July 1955, and testing of the spy plane was underway by the end of the month. The UFO sightings began almost immediately. The U-2's operating altitude of 60,000 feet was higher than any other aircraft at the time -- higher than some people even thought possible. "[I]f a U-2 was airborne in the vicinity of the airliner [during twilight hours] ... its silver wings would catch and reflect the rays of the sun and appear to the airliner pilot, 40,000 feet below, to be fiery objects," the CIA history notes.[....]

The latest declassified documents aren't exactly new revelations for Area 51 scholars -- much of this is known from interviews and inferences. In researching this article, I spoke to Bill Sweetman, an expert on secret U.S. military projects, who recounted the story of Bissell, Ritland, Johnson, and LeVier finding the site in the same detail as the declassified history. Sweetman directed me to the work of Chris Pocock, who has been reading between the lines of the CIA's redactions for decades. But the new report, all 355 pages of which you can read here, does tell a fascinating story about the origins of one of America's great mysteries.